The Key to Midnight

past midnight, Kyoto time, Joanna reached the number that they had found on J. Compton Woolrich's impressively heavy vellum stationery.
        The woman who answered the phone in London had never heard of a solicitor named Woolrich. She was the owner and manager of an antique shop on Jermyn Street. The number had belonged to her for more than eight years. She didn't know to whom it might have been assigned prior to the opening of her shop. Another blank wall.

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    30
        
        The Moonglow Lounge had closed early, at eleven-thirty, nearly an hour ago, and the staff had gone home by the time Joanna concluded the second call to London. Music no longer drifted up through the floor, and without a background melody, the winter night seemed preternaturally quiet, impossibly dark at the windows.
        Joanna switched on the CD player. Bach.
        She sat beside Alex on the sofa, and they continued to leaf through the gray-and-green Bonner-Hunter Security Corporation file folders that were stacked on the coffee table.
        Suddenly Alex said, 'I'll be damned!' He took a pair of eight-by-ten, black-and-white glossies from one of the folders. 'Look at this. Photographic enlargements of Lisa Chelgrin's thumbprints. We got one from her driver's license application and lifted the other from the clock radio an her bedroom. I'd forgotten about them.'
        'Hard proof,' Joanna said softly, half wishing that the prints did not exist.
        'We'll need an ink pad. And paper with a soft finish… but nothing too absorbent. We want a clear print, not a meaningless blot. And we've got to have a magnifying glass.'
        'The paper I have,' she said. 'And the ink pad. But not the magnifying glass… unless. There's a paperweight that might do.'
        She led him out of the living room, down the narrow stairs, and into her first-floor office.
        The paperweight was a clear, two-inch-thick lens, four inches in diameter. It had no frame or handle, and it wasn't optically flawless. But when Alex held it above the open accounts ledger that was filled with Joanna's neat handwriting, the letters and figures appeared three to five times larger than they did to the unassisted eye.
        'It'll do,' he said.
        Joanna got the ink and paper from the center drawer of her desk. After several tries, she managed to make two smudge-free thumbprints.
        Alex placed them beside the photographs. While Joanna scrubbed her inky fingers with paper tissues and spit, he used the lens to compare the prints.
        When Joanna had cleaned up as best she could without soap and hot water, Alex passed the magnifying glass to her.
        'I don't know what to look for,' she said.
        'Here. I'll show you.'
        'Can we cut to the chase?' she asked impatiently.
        'Sure.' He hesitated. 'Your prints and Lisa's are identical.'

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    31
        
        When at last Mariko returned to the Moonglow Lounge from the hospital where she had been at the bedside of Wayne Kennedy, Joanna and Alex were waiting for her at the table in the kitchen. They had made hot tea and a stack of small sandwiches.
        Mariko was exhausted, having slept less than three hours in the past thirty-six. Her face felt grimy, and her eyes burned. Her feet and legs were as leaden and swollen as those of an old woman.
        Joanna and Alex wanted a report on Wayne Kennedy, but Mariko had little to tell, other than that she was impressed by his strength and vitality. Kennedy had come out of anesthesia at 6:45, but he had not been fully coherent until nine o'clock, when he had complained about a dry mouth and gnawing hunger. The nurses gave him chips of ice to suck, but his dinner came from an intravenous-drip bottle even though he demanded eggs and bacon.
        'Is he in a lot of pain?' Alex asked.
        'A little. But drugs mask most of it.'
        When Wayne had been told by Dr. Ito that he would be in the hospital for a month and might need additional surgery, he had not been depressed in the least but had predicted that he'd be out in a week and back at work in two. Mariko had been prepared for the hard job of cheering him up, but he had been in good spirits and, before he had finally fallen asleep, had told her a lot of funny stories about his work with the security agency in Chicago.
        'Have the police questioned him?' Alex asked.
        'Not yet,' Mariko said. 'In the morning. I don't envy them if